Hilltop Steak House rides off into sunset Sunday

Saturday

Oct 19, 2013 at 4:32 PMOct 19, 2013 at 8:40 PM

By Katharine Q. Seelye, THE NEW YORK TIMES

SAUGUS — The six-person booths in the Hilltop Steak House here were packed on a recent afternoon, and a line of customers stretched out the door. The wait for a table was two hours; by evening, it had grown to four.

"If they had come before, we wouldn't be in this predicament," Jean Surprenant, 72, a waitress, said with a weak smile as she served a heaping plateful of sirloin tips.

The predicament is that the Hilltop, once reported to be the highest-grossing restaurant in the United States, has fallen on hard times. Surprenant, who has served the hungry throngs here for 46 years, longer than any other Hilltop waitress, said that as recently as two weeks ago, she would see only three or four customers in the cavernous dining rooms.

"It was dead," she said. "The place is old, it's too big and it's costing them money."

Management announced this month that business was so bad that the Hilltop would serve its last meals on Sunday and then shut its doors for good. Since the announcement, the depleted ranks of waitresses can hardly keep up with the crowds of former customers who have come flocking back, like long-lost relatives who had heard that a great-aunt they had not visited in years was on her deathbed.

"We're not trying to keep it alive, we're just here to say goodbye," said Heather Carroll, 34, one such patron, who had her bridal shower here several years ago.

The Hilltop, which opened in 1961 and is about eight miles north of Boston, was a prime example of the large Western-themed restaurants that thrived in postwar America as growing families put down roots in blue-collar suburbs like this one and wanted places to celebrate birthdays and anniversaries at affordable prices.

"It was part of the parade of big roadside restaurants that replaced local Kiwanis clubs as places to gather in the late '50s and '60s," said Corby Kummer, a restaurant critic for Boston magazine and a senior editor at The Atlantic magazine.

The cowboy décor of such restaurants, he said, reflected the enduring romance of the Old West that was evident in Hollywood and popular television series of the day like "Gunsmoke" and "Bonanza."

But the Hilltop stood out. For one thing, it is hard to miss the 68-foot-high illuminated green cactus sign and the herd of fiberglass cows out front, just a few feet from Route 1. The cactus, a lodestar along the busy commercial corridor, is to Saugus what the Hollywood sign is to Los Angeles — a landmark that says you know where you are. Word is that pilots have used the cactus to get their bearings.

For another thing, everything about the Hilltop is colossal. It seats 1,400 people over 4 acres, with 7 acres out back for parking. Even the parking spaces are outsize: 12 feet wide instead of the standard 9.

In the late 1980s, Restaurants & Institutions, a trade magazine now defunct, declared that the Hilltop was colossal in another way — it did more business than any restaurant in the country. The magazine estimated the restaurant's 1986 sales at $26.9 million. It was serving nearly 2.4 million people a year, three times as many as the nation's second-busiest restaurant, Tavern on the Green in Manhattan.

Hilltop's founder, Frank Giuffrida, was known for serving gigantic portions while keeping a lid on prices. That philosophy still rules: an 18-ounce bone-in sirloin steak costs $25.99.

Food industry experts told The Boston Globe in 1987 that Giuffrida devoted much more of his budget (50 percent) to food than other restaurants typically did (35 percent). That meant he was giving customers a better deal and accepting a lower profit margin, but generating enormous volume.

And it was a fun place for young people who came for the cheap food and the campy atmosphere. One year, pranksters from MIT kidnapped a fiberglass cow and hoisted it atop the university's Great Dome.

Many who came to say goodbye admitted that they had not come for years. The food was not as good, they said, and the place had not kept up with the times.

"We used to come once a week in the '70s and '80s," said Irene Rais, 72. But the last time she came, a few years ago, she said, the steak was tough. She came for a last meal not out of fondness but to use a gift certificate.

"When Frank was here, he ran it like you wouldn't believe," she said of Giuffrida. "But when he died and they sold it, it went downhill. And now the kids don't come."